Dominiek.com

some random thoughts I’ve been putting down on a writeboard

Recently, I discovered a cool feature on my Macbook. If I hold the control key and scroll with my mousewheel/pad – I can zoom in and zoom out very smoothly. I’ve started using this a lot and it’s become part of my digital habits. I do it that often that colleagues almost think of me as the crazy zooming guy. This full screen zooming is good for many things during my normal productivity hours. I often use the zooming to show people certain parts of a User Interface and sometimes I use it to zoom in on a piece of text to make a statement :]. Also, it’s useful for pair programming. Now, partly because of my deteriorating eyesight, I can zoom in on something and sit back. This could be a word or a picture and while I sit back, I can really think about it. Zooming-in gets rid of all the other chaos on the screen and helps you to focus.

I guess the zooming metaphor applies to many things in life. As work – trained as an engineer – I deal a lot with the nitty gritty of things. I used to program a lot of low-level stuff like Assembly and C code. However I’ve done some more abstract technical things over the past years like: programming in a variety of languages, design patterns and thinking about user interaction. So far, I’ve been apt at being able to zoom in and out in a certain scope of my skill-sets. Most of it has been technical or related to building software. Right now I’m trying to extend my professional zoom-scope to extend areas that require right-brain thinking like design and business/strategy. Also in personal life – which is heavily intertwined with that old term ‘professional life’ – you can apply zooming very well. Zooming-in means getting short term things done, like changing the light bulb in the toilet. Zoomed out means planning ahead and equally important: changing one’s habits.

Another brother of zooming is filtering. Filtering out the irrelevance in today’s information overload is already visible in multi billion dollar industries and in a notable company called Google. The coming semantic wave – or web 3.0 if you will – stresses the importance of user interfaces that deal with the abundance of information. In recent web design trends it’s easy to spot the shift towards information abundance. Websites now have big fonts for important summarizing one-liners whereas old websites i.e. portals tried to cram as much information on the screen as possible. Zooming and filtering will be important metaphors in future User Interfaces. Google Maps and the iPhone browser are notable first examples of these so-called Zooming User Interfaces (ZUI’s).